“There ain’t no queer in cowboy and I don’t care for
anyone suggesting there is,” snapped Wyoming cowboy Jim-Bob
Zimmerschied in December 2005 (qtd. in Sherwell). The growing
numbers of participants at regional and national gay rodeo
finals, and
the existence of the International Gay Rodeo Association (founded
in 1981 and now with member associations across most states,
the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces) might
suggest
otherwise. But, responding to questions about Ang Lee’s
critically acclaimed film Brokeback Mountain, Zimmerschied
continued: “I’ve
been doing this job all my life and I ain’t never met
no gay cowboy…John Wayne and Will Rogers, they made real
cowboy movies. They portrayed us like we are” (qtd. in
Sherwell).

Nearly thirty years after his death, Wayne’s name has been
continually invoked in interviews, reviews, and articles sparked
by the release of Brokeback Mountain. Ubiquitous in
Western genre films from the 1930s through the 1970s, and a
cultural icon of
titanic proportions, Wayne’s tall stature, chiseled jaw,
and broad shoulders made him the perfect celluloid cowboy.
His performances set the standard by which all Hollywood cowboys – including
Ang Lee’s – were then judged. “I think my
career demonstrates that I am no panty-waist,” Wayne
told a Playboy journalist in 1971 (92),
and this decades-long career had made Wayne a poster-boy for
strong, independent, American masculinity.
Wayne’s was also a heterosexual masculinity. His on and
off screen personas were unambiguously straight: on screen
he idealized
a vision of virile straight men who waged battle by day and
wooed women by night, and off-screen his personal demeanor
and political
values seemingly mirrored those of his cowboy characters. He
espoused conservative causes, repeatedly expressed a personal
distaste for
homosexuality, particularly its pervasive presence in Hollywood,
and proclaimed himself disgusted by Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly
Last Summer (1959). “They’ve gone and killed
John Wayne with this movie,” concluded Zimmerschied of Brokeback
Mountain (qtd. in Sherwell). But while
Lee’s portrayal of gay cowhands
in Brokeback Mountain might be an affront to the John
Wayne myth of an exclusively heterosexual frontier, it is by
no means the
first. Beginning in the late 1960s, this cultural myth has
been under attack.

John
Schlesinger’s Western, Vietnam,
and a
Frontier Dystopia

It was a brisk January day in 1974 and the citizens
of Cambridge did not know what to make of the spectacle. A boisterous
crowd
of nearly 400 Harvard students was milling about a military
armored personnel-carrier as it made its way down Mt. Auburn
Street towards
the Harvard Lampoon office. All eyes were fixed upon the 6’4” barrel-chested
figure who stood atop the tank with an unloaded gun, smiling
and waving casually as he dodged the occasional incoming snowball.
Cambridge’s celebrity visitor was none other than John
Wayne, celluloid cowboy extraordinaire and the recent recipient
of the
Lampoon’s Brass Balls Award, given in recognition of
his “machismo” and
his “penchant for hitting people in the mouth” (Kifner
41). An article in the New York Times noted that although Wayne
was foraying into “hostile territory,” he managed
to charm the liberal-leaning campus community. The Lampoon
had invited
him to take part in a political debate where he answered pointed
questions on his conservative politics. A handful of Native
American activists protested his appearance but, despite the
obstacles,
the Duke dominated the day’s proceedings with his mix
of rough bravado, folksy humor, and sincere disregard for the
academy’s
liberal sensitivities. The New York Times even summed up the
day’s
debate by painting Wayne as a modern-day Theodore Roosevelt – a “symbol
of American mythology: cowboy, soldier, agent of empire” (Kifner
41).

Wayne dominated Harvard that winter day, just as his character
Dunson had dominated the body and spirit of Matthew Garth in
Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948). Ironically,
however, Red
River is one of several pre-Stonewall counter-westerns: The
Outlaw (1943),
The Left-Handed Gun (1958), and Red River are
all charged with homo-eroticism. But while the gay sub-currents
of these pre-Stonewall
films occasionally bubble up in moments of release, any up-swellings
are usually mitigated, subdued, or window-dressed. It wasn’t
until the 1969 release of both Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight
Cowboy that homoerotic undercurrents within
the western genre reached the point of overflow. Much ink has
been spilled by critics debating
whether Joe and Rizzo’s relationship in Midnight
Cowboy is
homosexual, for it resists a conclusive label (though even
Wayne could not ignore its explicit interrogation of cowboy
sexuality:
answering a Playboy interviewer’s question about “perverted” films,
Wayne responded, “Wouldn’t you say that…Midnight
Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies? But don’t
get me wrong; as far as a man and woman are concerned, I’m
awfully happy there’s a thing called sex” [76]).
However, the true significance of John Schlesinger’s
1969 film lies in this critical debate itself: Midnight
Cowboy marks a tentative
yet clear turning-point in the history of the Hollywood western.

Midnight Cowboy is the tale of a Texan named Joe Buck
who takes a bus to New York in search of rich women who will
hire him
as a hustler, but who instead ends up spending a hard winter
with
a con artist named Ratso Rizzo. As Joe leaves Texas in the
film’s
opening moments, he passes an abandoned movie theatre whose
marquee still advertises the last film shown, Wayne’s
The Alamo (1960). That film has a special place in
John Wayne’s
filmography, for Wayne not only starred but also directed and
produced it as
his personal pet project. The abandoned movie theater suggests
a masculine icon in peril – another toppled, empty myth – and
anticipates the situation in New York, where macho gay cowboy
clones further undermine masculine signifiers. In fact, another
toppling
strategy employed by Schlesinger is to focus on the largely
performative foundations of the macho cowboy myth. Joe wears
a snappy, tight-fitting
cowboy outfit complete with western boots and a hat, and the
camera frequently dwells on booted feet walking or cowboy hats
bouncing
along the street, yet women wear faux western outfits, and
gay male hustlers dress as cowboy clones. Schlesinger’s
clones emphasize the fragility of the macho cowboy myth, as
Rizzo explains: “That
great big dumb cowboy crap of yours don’t appeal to nobody,
except every Jackie on 42nd street! That’s faggot stuff!
You want to call it by its name, that’s strictly for
fags!” In
reply, Joe stammers: “John Wayne?! You’re gonna
tell me that John Wayne’s a fag?!” This tentative,
yet open vocalization of the homoerotic subcurrents in westerns
signaled
a shift in the cultural landscape: fissures had formed in the
cowboy’s
identity, in part because of the pervasive presence of frontier
language and imagery during the Vietnam war. 1.

The frontier loomed large as early as 1960, when John F. Kennedy’s
Democratic Party Nomination acceptance speech observed: “From
the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of
old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives
to build a new world here in the West…But the problems
are not all solved and the battles are not all won, and we stand
today on the edge of a new frontier.” Seven years later
American politicians and generals called hostile Vietnam “Indian
country” and referenced “Daniel Boon Squads.” In
Dispatches, for example, Michael Herr claims that a
captain invited him to play cowboys and Indians. Vietnam had
become a movie:
approached by politicians like a western and fought by cowboy-generals
and soldiers with expectations of what veteran Ron Kovic later
called “the glory John Wayne war” (158). The silver-screen
myth of the West seemed to be informing America’s ongoing
struggle in Vietnam: a pioneer cavalry entered a wilderness of
savages, and Kovic, for one, felt like “your John Wayne
come home,” as the first-edition cover to his Vietnam memoir
put it.

Conflated in the American imagination were frontier myths, the
Vietnam War, and the cult of John Wayne. As Richard Slotkin explains
in Gunfighter Nation, the frontier myth “provided
an imaginative model of the kind of historical actor who is needed
in a struggle
of this kind.” The “new enemy does not fight by civilized
rules,” Slotkin continues, and so “can only be defeated
by someone who combines the amoral pragmatism and technical expertise
of the gunfighter with the skill in handling natives that belongs
to the ‘man who knows Indians’” (446). Slotkin
adds that the “historical past was itself encoded in the
terms of myth…the scenarios and game-models developed by
the policy-makers were not very different from the imaginative
projections that were developed by fiction writers and filmmakers…Tropes
and symbols derived from Western movies had become one of the
more important interpretive grids through which Americans tried
to understand and control their unprecedented and dismaying experiences
in Vietnam” (546). And, while history became a movie, movies
about Vietnam referenced frontier-history. Directors, unwilling
to make explicit antiwar movies, transformed Vietnam into the
Indian frontier: Soldier Blue (1970) and Little
Big Man (1970)
drew parallels between the Sand Creek and Wichita River massacres
of 1864 and 1868, and the My Lai massacre of 1968. Westerns made
between 1965 and 1972 were often about Vietnam, and Vietnam continued
to be represented as a western: after the war, The Deer Hunter (1978) revisited Vietnam as a mythic frontier, drawing upon James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer (1841), and in Full
Metal Jacket (1987) a soldier asks, “Is that you, John Wayne?
Is this me?” while another comments, “I’ll
be General Custer, but who’ll be the Indians?”

Only one Vietnam film was made while the war unfolded: The
Green Berets (1968), a propagandist movie partly sponsored by the Department
of Defense and the only feature film of the period to support
American involvement in Vietnam. Wayne directed and starred as
Colonel Kirby, named after a character in Fort Apache (1948).
The Montagnard outpost becomes “Dodge City” and Wayne’s
western persona blends with his other significant genre role
as a soldier. The film’s producer even admitted: “when
you’re making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys” (qtd.
in Suid 233). Thus helping to sustain America’s cowboy
dreams on the silver screen – offering the frontier cowboy
as a model American soldier – Wayne also translated those
dreams into Realpolitik, becoming a vocal supporter of the war.

Yet by 1968 the war had begun to undermine Americans’ confidence
in their classic cowboy and Indian narratives; cultural myths
of an Anglo-American aggressor who always triumphed over the
colored Other. “I gave my dead d--- for John Wayne and
Howdy Doody,” wrote Kovic (whose war-wounds left him impotent),
also describing “a generation of violence and madness,
of dead Indians and drunken cowboys” (98, 158). Doctors
dubbed a post-Vietnam stress disorder the “John Wayne Syndrome,” and
Kovic’s disillusionment with this war echoed across war
journalism, veteran memoirs, and interviews. One marine in Dispatches hates the movie he’s in, and another veteran recalled: “When
I went to Vietnam, I believed in Jesus Christ and John Wayne.
After Vietnam, both went down the tubes. It don’t mean
nothin’” (qtd. in Mahedy 33). Still another recounted: “I
lost my footing and slipped into a ditch, went under the water
and came up and out, screaming, ‘This ain’t a war
movie! This ain’t a John Wayne movie!’…It took
me six months in Vietnam to wake up…[Movies] could no longer
help me to deflect reality” (qtd. in Bird 11). America
was finding no regeneration through violence in Vietnam. In 1970,
journalist Saul Pett observed: “We walk safely among the
craters of the moon but not in the parks of New York or Chicago
or Los Angeles. Technology and change run berserk, headlights
hide by day and moral values shred overnight. The unthinkable
multiplies until it seems ‘things fall apart – the
center cannot hold’…America is no longer immune to
history…America, we seem suddenly to have discovered, is
no longer infinite in space or resources or hope. There is no
next valley or virgin forest to tread” (qtd. in Roberts
and Olson 586). Echoing Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893
pronouncement of the closing of the frontier, Pett’s article
re-declared the end of cowboy dreams: someone tell John Wayne
the cowboy is not invincible.

Wayne was a standard-bearer for the American right, and he came
under attack from Native American groups, feminists, and gay
rights groups, as well as from anti-war protesters. After all,
when inviting Wayne to Harvard, the Lampoon had written: “We’ve
heard you’re supposed to be some kind of legend, everybody
talks about your he-man prowess… You think you’re
tough. We’re not so tough. We dare you to have it out,
head on, with young whelps here who call the supposedly unbeatable
John Wayne, the biggest fraud in history” (qtd. in Kifner
41). Though Wayne often fought back against criticism, frequently
offering incendiary comments to the press, the students’ confrontational
language and ironic cynicism was indicative of Wayne’s
contested legacy in the wake of campus anti-war sentiment. 2.

Activists from all of the 1960s major protest movements turned
the pervasive frontier mythology back on those perpetuating it
and appropriated the cowboy soundtrack to Vietnam. Within the
context of the Native American protest movement, some activists
argued that if history was repeating itself, then – contrary
to Marx’s famous dictum that it repeats first time as tragedy,
second time as farce – Vietnam repeated a tragedy: “history
repeats itself and this is not the first time that American soldiers
have murdered women and children…how about Wounded Knee?”,
observed a letter to Life magazine in 1969 (qtd. in
White 46). A protest image by Roland Winkler, published in the
journal
Akwesasne
Notes in 1974, juxtaposed North American
Indians with Vietnamese, connected by a flag in the shape of
the Statue of Liberty superimposed,
and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)
sold over five million copies within two years: Brown’s
success was due in part to the situation in Vietnam, for his
book’s
publication coincided with protests against the war that pointed
to the inherent violence of American culture and sought previous
examples of America’s empire mentality. If there were connections
between the wars at home and abroad, then protest over Vietnam
could inspire and fuel protest over domestic abuses of power.
American Indian Movement (AIM) members, many of whom were Vietnam
veterans, identified with anti-Vietnam war protestors, connecting
American imperialism abroad and at home. Activists drew comparisons
between Vietnam and Wounded Knee, then returned to the site of
Wounded Knee for a battle with U.S. armed forces and a 71-day
occupation from March to May 1973 – one of AIM’s
most high-profile protests. “The best analogy is South
Viet Nam,” insisted Kenneth Tilson, an attorney fighting
the government’s illegal invasions of reservations. “Most
obviously, there is a corrupt government of natives, who are
set up, armed, supplied, financed, propagandized for, and maintained
in power by the U.S. Government” (qtd. in Voices 128).

Some wondered if contemporary Indian wars were in fact preparation
for Vietnam: “we used to talk about ‘bringing the
war home,’” said Bruce Elison recently. “[T]he
FBI…thought that that was really a good idea, and many
of the tactics that they used in Indochina and Central America
and other places in this world, they decided to try out on the
Pine Ridge Reservation” (n.p.). The U.S. government did “bring
the war home”: one government agency ran a public campaign
linking the Black Panthers to the Vietcong. But, again, activists
turned this connection around. Beyond AIM, the late 1960s and
early 1970s saw Civil Rights and Black Power protesters make
the connection between the wars at home and abroad. On January
6, 1966, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee issued
a public position paper that connected lynching to the Vietnam
war: “The murder of Samuel Young in Tuskegee, Alabama,
is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam,” they
said. “Samuel Young was murdered because the United States
law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are murdered because the
United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of
international law” (416). The Panthers were soldiers at
war in “the jungle which is America,” added Reginald
Major (280), and in 1967 Huey Newton set Vietnam in a history
of racist policies: “The enslavement of black people from
the very beginning of this country, the genocide practiced on
the American Indians and the confining of the survivors on reservations,
the savage lynching of thousands of black men and women…and
now the cowardly massacre in Vietnam, all testify,” he
claimed, “to the fact that toward people of color the racist
power structure of America has but one policy: repression, genocide,
terror, and the big stick” (7). If the race war raged abroad,
it also continued at home: “As the aggression of the racist
American government escalates in Vietnam, the police agencies
of America escalate the repression of black people throughout
the ghettoes of America,” said Newton (8). In 1969, a letter
in Life magazine reiterated the connections between
domestic racial upheaval and the Vietnam counterinsurgency: “We
have thousands of Mylais every day right here in America,” said
the reader; “the brutalizing of individuals in the everyday
life of urban communities…We accept killing, the killing
of civilians in Vietnam and the killing here in Chicago of the
head of the black Panthers, as…a way of life” (qtd.
in White 46).

Betty Friedan then connected the feminist movement and the Vietnam
war; a war seemingly driven by America’s frontier mythology
and its well-established vision of ideal masculinity. She recalled
seeing male anti-war protesters in 1968, “saying they didn’t
have to napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove
they were men,” and realizing that they were “defying
the masculine mystique as we had defied the feminine mystique” (391-2).
Connecting the feminist movement to the anti-war movement, she
explained in 1973: “I believe the locked-up sexual energies
have helped to fuel, more than anyone realizes, the terrible
violence erupting in the nation and the world during the past
ten years. If I am right, the sex-role revolution will liberate
those energies from the service of death and will make it really
possible for men and women to ‘make love, not war’” (395).
Adrienne Rich made a similar connection between masculinity and
war in her 1976 sequence of lesbian-love sonnets, “Twenty-One
Love Poems”: “You know, I think that men love wars,” she
wrote. “And they still control the world, and you are not
in my arms” (35).

Slotkin documents how the western genre was beset by “counterculture
Westerns” in the early 1970s, and links this to Vietnam
and race-based protest (631). In part, the 1960s marked the beginning
of the end for the hegemonic legacy of Theodore Roosevelt’s
conception of the American West. While cowhands in the nineteenth
century were a group of diverse races and ethnicities, Roosevelt
white-washed demographic realities to portray them as distinctly
white heroes of the frontier. But while Slotkin explores how
race defined Roosevelt’s conception of the frontier, he
largely ignores the gender dynamics at work in that conception.
Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization goes
some way toward correcting this oversight, explaining that Roosevelt’s
racial philosophy was inextricably related to his schematic understanding
of gender roles in civilized society (18), and, extending this
observation to the 1960s, Martin Pumphrey singles out feminism
to argue that protest movements asked modern audiences to view
the western and Wayne’s cowboy masculinity as anachronistic
and ironic (93). Pumphrey’s focus upon gender counterbalances
Slotkin’s focus upon race, but neither critic discusses
sexuality in their examinations of counter-cultural challenges
to the western – in spite of Schlesinger’s “perverse” story “about
two fags” and Andy Warhol’s flamboyantly queer western
of 1969, Lonesome Cowboys.

Yet gay rights activists also questioned the acceptance of an
exclusively heterosexual American frontier, again confirming
the domestic roots of America’s mess abroad and undermining
the cultural myths and stereotypes that America had enshrined
in the form of Wayne’s westerns. Some envisaged an exclusively
homosexual utopia instead. Carl Wittman’s “Refugees
from Amerika” called for free, self-governed territory.
L. Craig Schoonmaker, leader of Homosexuals Intransigent!, wanted
to make gays a majority, suggesting migration to certain city
neighborhoods and the takeover of election districts. He recommended
beginning with Manhattan’s 19th and 20th Congressional
Districts and called this the first Gay Power district (qtd.
in Teal 292). Don Jackson wanted to take over Alpine County,
in California’s Sierra Nevada, and turn it into a “Stonewall
Nation.” At a Berkeley gay liberation conference in December
1969 he laid out his gay nationalist vision: “A beautiful
valley in the mountains…A place where a gay government
can build the basis for a flourishing gay counter-culture and
city…There is a county in California where 200 gays would
constitute a majority of registered voters…The colony could
become the gay symbol of liberty, a world center for the gay
counter-culture, and a shining symbol of hope to all gay people
in the world.” Jackson asked pioneers to help form this
Stonewall Nation (qtd. in Teal 292-4).

Amid these calls for a new, gay frontier space, gay cowboys began
to peek further out of the proverbial closet. Clones appeared
within the queer community in the late 1960s and early 1970s:
gay men who adopted an overtly butch fashion style that looked
to traditional images of masculinity for inspiration (the biker,
the lumberjack, the construction worker, and of course, the cowboy). “It
would be unlikely for an American boy growing up [in the 1960s]
not to have a cowboy hero,” explained one gay man to fashion
historian Shaun Cole (127), and clones (so named because they
all looked alike) were particularly drawn to the cowboy – in
large part because cowboys were larger-than-life masculine icons.
Then Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight Cowboy reclaimed the silver
screen frontier as a space for gay cowboys.

Midnight Cowboy’s connection
to Vietnam is most powerfully established during the nightmare
sequence. When Joe
is anally
raped in a frantic dream with terrifying flashbacks, the John
Wayne myth of heterosexual masculinity is sodomized right along
with him. The dream sequence depicts a violent gang-bang. Joe’s
girlfriend Annie is ripped from his arms, leaving him to be raped
by a male posse while she is assaulted in the distance. Joe wakes
and yells: “Where my boots, where are my damn boots?!” His
dream of rape becomes an almost-castration, felt in the absence
of his cowboy boots. Even more significantly, the first thing
he hears upon waking is the sound of a radio anchor announcing
the latest death toll in Vietnam. He grabs the radio out of Rizzo’s
hands and switches it off, but cowboy identity, the Vietnam war,
and the traumatic rape have collapsed into each other: the scene
symbolizes the psychological rape of American warrior-masculinity
suffered in Vietnam. 3.

The real-life frontier space of Texas – as well as the
filmic frontier so long kept open by Wayne – has been closed.
But Midnight Cowboy offers little by way of a new frontier space,
for Schlesinger’s vision of an alternative remains decidedly
dystopian. Joe’s decision to abandon his dead-end existence
as a dishwasher in small-town Texas and depart for New York had
seemingly constructed Manhattan as the new frontier space. In
the shower before departing Texas, he sings: “Whoopee yi
yo! Git along, little doggie, for you know New York will be your
new home” The song is a classic Western tune, but the traditional
lyrics, as first composed by Owen Wister in 1893, are: “you
know that Wyoming will be your new home.” The substitution
of New York for the Cheyenne State inverts the traditional East
to West frontier narrative, but New York turns out to be no modern
utopia. Increasingly lost and dejected, Joe runs out of money
and wanders the streets of Gotham that have become his own dystopic
urban jungle. As though emphasizing this closing of the frontier,
Joe’s New York dream sequence includes numerous scenes
where shallow visual fields and jarring camera angles create
a sense of claustrophobic entrapment. Several shots in the dream
sequence show him trapped in the dead-end of a New York alley,
or with his face pressed against a barbed-wire fence (like those
that closed off the frontier and ended cattle drives in the great
plains). Initially trapped in Texas, he now finds himself trapped
in New York. For, if the 1960s saw a crisis in America’s
frontier mythology, then Joe is confronting a post-frontier reality:
what Herr describes as “the turnaround point where [history]
would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter” (49).

Rizzo, on the other hand, dreams of Florida, rather than New
York. He adorns his derelict building with brightly-colored posters
depicting sunny skies and bountiful orange groves. But his imagined
Florida utopia is also a no-place. One of his daydreams begins
with the pair running happily along a beach, but it quickly turns
nightmarish. Then, toward the end of the film, shots of passing
scenery seen through the bus window on the way to Miami, echo
similar scenes from Joe’s journey to New York. This framing
device in the film echoes Herr’s “containing perimeter” in
its circularity. There’s no frontier left and Rizzo and
Joe run in vain, as a sign glimpsed earlier in the film had prophesied:
at one point Joe’s Manhattan-bound bus passed a roadside
motel with a bright neon sign that reads, “The El Dorado.” Just
as that mythic land kept the Spaniards searching in vain, so
the effort to find a new American frontier is similarly thwarted.
Rizzo dies on the bus to Miami leaving Joe alone. Florida is
still out of reach for Rizzo – and for Rizzo and Joe as
a pair – and the film ends with Joe discarding his cowboy
costume. Having woken from an actual dream to hear bad news about
America’s latest “Indian War” on the radio,
Joe now hears the broader wake-up call for a country cowboy-dreaming
its way through a war.

Andy Warhol’s Western, the Gay Rights
Movement, and a Queer Frontier

Throughout the 1960s, the growing visibility and activism of
racial, feminist, and gay minority groups fermented social unrest
and pushed Americans to re-examine long-held assumptions about
what made men “men.” The acceptance of heterosexual
hegemony was being challenged on multiple fronts by gay rights
groups, and, while Midnight Cowboy had connected the gay cowboy
to the crisis in Vietnam, Lonesome Cowboys used the figure of
the gay cowboy to connect the 1960s gay rights movement to earlier
forms of gay activism. In particular, Lonesome Cowboys engages
the gay rights movement’s internal debate over the acceptance
of effeminate “fairies.” This issue had been a point
of heated debate within the gay community for quite some time.
As homophobic persecution increased during the Lavender Scare
of the early Cold War period, new organizations were formed to
address the needs of the gay community. The two most famous of
these were The Mattachine Society, founded in 1951 by gay rights
activist Harry Hay, and a more radical off-shoot organization
called ONE, which aggressively agitated for gay rights in the
1950s. The differing politics of these organizations is clear
from the debate surrounding effeminate or “fairy” gay
men, which tapped into the deeper issue of how gays understood
themselves through traditional gender paradigms. The Mattachine
Society’s more conservative tendencies and its aversion
to the taint of Communism marginalized more flamboyant homosexuals – the
topic of one meeting was: “What can we do about those swishes
and dykes that give us a bad name?” ONE took the opposite
course, embracing a vision of a distinct gay minority identity
and fashioning a broad-based, radical approach.

Activist Jim Kepner attended the Mattachine meeting that addressed
the perceived problem of “swishes and dykes.” He
recounts that the discussion included repeated complaints that
flamboyant gays were hindering the movement by making heterosexuals
uncomfortable, until he finally protested – reminding the
group that “it was those obvious ones who established squatter’s
rights to the Gay bars that the rest of us could sneak in and
out of” (3). Continuing to insist that it was flamboyant
gays, already marginalized by their obvious nature, who had initiated
the homophile movement, Kepner went on to write an editorial
for ONE magazine, in 1954, lambasting those gay who “puritanically
attack swishes and fairies, insisting they’d never associate
with such trash.” Kepner’s editorial explained: “They
will try to excommunicate any homosexual who belies their view
that we aren’t really different. Neither rebels, nor swishes,
nor any others who fall short of their standards of respectability
will be welcome in their society…Is our aim to pacify,
or to fight?…I am interested in defending my right to be
as different as I damn please. And I’ve picked up the notion
that I can’t protect my own rights without fighting for
everyone else’s” (16).

The debate between Mattachine and ONE over effeminate gays was
soon rendered obsolete by the Stonewall riots: that night on
Christopher Street marked the beginning of a fundamental shift
in the politics of gay rights activism. But this short history
of the homophile movement’s differing attitudes towards
effeminate gay men offers another perspective from which to view
the subversion of the John Wayne cowboy image by Lonesome
Cowboys, with its campy cowboys, and Midnight Cowboy, with its uber-masculine
clones. In Lonesome Cowboys, there is no longer anything “unspoken” about
the love that dare not speak its name: Warhol constructs a Wild
Wilde West and a gay utopia that stands in stark contrast to
the dystopia imagined by Schlesinger. Even more importantly,
however, Lonesome Cowboys offers a frontier utopia where an effeminate
cowboy might exist. The town sheriff is an occasional transvestite,
and one character notes that they’ve always been accepting
of him: “we always respect you…when you got your
new wig, no one said anything – we even drove you into
town.” Warhol depicts a relationship of tolerance between
the macho gay cowboy and the drag queen sheriff; a union of seeming
opposites.

Throughout the film, Warhol’s campy cowboys subvert the
hyper-masculine John Wayne stereotype. The narrative begins as
a curly-haired brunette named Ramona travels the Southwest with
her male nurse. They wander the abandoned streets of an ordinary-looking
frontier town in Arizona, “looking for a little companionship.” The
nurse is immediately coded as gay in traditional Hollywood fashion,
with his high-pitched lisp and swishing gait. He soon comments
of an empty church that “an altar boy would have done…for
either of us.” The pair is then greeted by a band of five “brothers” that
ride into town, and a quarrel quickly develops. Ramona questions
the brothers’ sexuality, and her nurse makes sexual comments
(“look at that man, with a bulge in his pants!”).
Enraged, the eldest brother Louis yells: “Listen sheriff – tell
these creeps – tell them that they can’t walk around
staring at my brothers…those people are perverts,” but
his siblings respond warmly with awkward smiles, bowing their
heads coyly as the camera lingers on their faces and bodies.

The film shifts to an extended campground scene, where the mostly-naked “brothers” share
sleeping bags and cavort in an extended homoerotic wrestling
match. The nurse pairs up with one of the younger brothers, prompting
Ramona to remark: “But you came out here to cure your perversion.” The
nurse is explicitly rejecting the nineteenth-century vision of
the frontier as a site of male regeneration, while the wrestling
match mocks the warrior-masculinity of those regenerated men.
Lonesome Cowboys then moves towards a new vision of
the frontier. One of the younger brothers yells at Louis for
spending the night
with a newcomer named Tom: “I was supposed to sleep with
him last night!” Louis ignores his brother and tells Tom: “I
want you to stay with us, be a part of us if you can…you’re
so beautiful.” The film ends with the pairing of Louis
and Tom, who ride off into the sunset, bound for California – a
frontier space with “lots of beautiful men,” as Louis
promises, adding: “It’s great, you can get anything
you want out there.” The space of the Western frontier
wilderness is explicitly marked in opposition to the East: “How
can you learn life if you’re in the East where they have
books, mathematicians, and reading?” one cowboy remarks. “You
should be out here, under the trees of life.” There is
something “under the trees” that offers these cowboys
their regenerative frontier: a utopia regenerated through desire
rather than violence. Lonesome Cowboys even had the original
title of Ramona and Julian: if camp is the opposite of tragedy,
then these names are significant. Warhol inverts the genders
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and his parodic inversion
suggests that Lonesome Cowboys rejects the tragic queer-frontier
narrative; strains of which are evident in films like The
Outlaw,
The Left-Handed Gun, and Red River, which variously kill off the
queer cowboy, allow him to remain but control latent subversiveness
within the trappings of heterosexuality, or banish him to Mexico.
Not abandoning but rather adapting America’s cowboy dreams,
Warhol offers a renewed vision of the West as what might be termed
a homotopia. John Wayne would be skeptical, but Ang Lee’s
Jack Twist would surely approve.

To argue that Warhol is queering the frontier, and attacking
the John Wayne myth of a heterosexual frontier world, is to run
contrary to many critics. For example, Mark Finch, former co-programmer
of the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, notes that “Cowboys doesn’t
lay any claims to being a political statement,” and
asserts “the absence of easy links between the film’s
form and this crucial moment in civil rights politics” (117).
Finch misses the political and historical significance of Lonesome
Cowboys because he insists that the film has little in common
with traditional westerns. Yet the film’s narrative is
set at the turn of the twentieth century: the backdrop scenery
depicts a classic frontier town with hastily erected wooden structures
and dusty unpaved roads, and the characters dress in period attire
while playing classic western roles (sheriff, outlaw-cowboys,
and the lone woman lost in an otherwise exclusively male world).
Staying true to the genre, Warhol’s camp aesthetic was
able to manipulate it, allowing the film to take aim at the self-important
mythology that had infused westerns since the 1930s. Warhol even
shot the film at the Old Tucson set in Arizona, where John Wayne
had filmed on numerous occasions. Undermining Wayne’s hyper-straight
cowboy with its fake fellatio and naked all-male romping scenes,
Lonesome Cowboys simultaneously soils the physical space of the
Old Tucson set. Like Schlesinger, Warhol mocks the abandoned
mausoleum of myth.

Another aspect of Warhol’s strategy in toppling the mythology
of Westerns is to imbue his film with overtones of a post-Western.
Before the narrative proper is an extended soft-core sex scene
between a curly-haired brunette (the as-yet unidentified Ramona)
and her blond Adonis lover. This opening is incongruous with
the rest of the film, but it sets the central theme of Warhol’s
western: sex. The scene is too mechanical to be erotic and too
tedious to be pornographic; it takes the blond lover nearly four,
drawn-out minutes to remove his pants. In fact, the scene is
so oddly mundane that the viewer’s attention gravitates
towards the background rock music: “At the old Rialto theater,
the West that lives on the screen brightens up the mezzanine.
There I sit stretching wide, just like Lonesome Cowboys ride.
At Rialto intermissions, when the dudes slip around…I let
my mind turn away, and dream again about the day that I be Lonesome
Cowboy bound.” This soundtrack throws the already-confused
viewer further off-balance by introducing a self-reflexivity
(“the West that lives on the screen”). The film’s
opening strategy repeats throughout: Warhol continually seeks
to highlight the discrepancy between the genre’s supposed
reality and the frontier’s actual reality, often through
jarring and self-reflexive juxtapositions between a scene’s
visual message and the soundtrack’s spoken one. In addition,
the track emphasizes the escapist, fantasy quality of the singer’s
identification with the Rialto’s celluloid cowboys. Along
with Warhol’s abrupt opening, mechanical sex scene, and
the meta-references throughout, it promises a wake-up call from
old-school cowboy dreams.

Unlike Schlesinger, Warhol offered the potentially radical vision
of a utopian queer frontier; an attractive alternative to America’s
fast-spoiling cowboy dreams. Still, the film’s dependence
on a camp aesthetic reinforces many of the pre-Stonewall stereotypes
of effeminate queers, for though the brothers are not as flamboyant
as the nurse, most of them “swish” to some extent.
Revolutionary as his film was, Warhol’s gay cowboys perhaps
posed less of a threat to male masculinity than the butch Times
Square clones of Midnight Cowboy. Yet the public reaction to
these films indicates a greater degree of comfort with Schlesinger’s
film: Midnight Cowboy, a feature film release by a major Hollywood
Studio (United Artists), was a huge success with critics and
at the box-office, going on to win seven Academy Award nominations
and the “best picture” Oscar – despite its
initial X rating from the MPAA – while the reception of
Warhol’s film was quite the opposite. Critics panned it,
and the FBI condemned it as perverse and dangerous, seizing it
repeatedly during screenings in major cities throughout the early
1970s. Warhol’s hopes of releasing the film to a large
audience eventually died under the weight of government censorship
and after its initial theatrical release, the film’s distribution
was limited to one small production run of VHS tapes in Britain.
It had to be recovered for archival research purposes in a mid-1980s
special joint project by the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney
Museum.

Lonesome Cowboys, with its vision of a gay frontier that is willing
to reject John Wayne machismo, was noticeably less nostalgic
in tone than Midnight Cowboy. That militancy was likely difficult
for audiences to accept (when coupled with an avant-garde, art-house
style that makes the film seem unpolished, disjointed, and inaccessible
for many mainstream viewers). The contrasting success of Midnight
Cowboy suggests how deeply it resonated with critics and audiences
across the nation: though in many ways a far more depressing
film, it interrogated cowboy masculinity while still valuing
it. Joe’s comment, “You’re gonna tell me John
Wayne’s a fag?!”, reveals an anxiety that mourned
what was lost and tried desperately to cling to the cowboy myth
despite its faltering. The Vietnam war and 1960s protest culture
helped make Midnight Cowboy and Lonesome Cowboys possible, yet
even at this watershed moment Americans were more receptive to
a depressing dystopia as long as it properly mourned the erosion
of the John Wayne myth. To Warhol’s less depressing but
far more seditious and liberating vision of a gay frontier, Americans
responded with angry accusations of perversity.

In 1969, five years before Wayne blustered into Harvard Square,
the stormy winds that had blown throughout the decade finally
coalesced into a typhoon of change, engulfing and uprooting the
myths of manhood upon which America had come to rely. Stepping
out of the celluloid closet more decisively than ever before,
the gay cowboy found himself at a crossroads. His future was
still uncertain. The clear emergence of latent homoerotic subcurrents,
and the shift beyond this newly apparent liminal space – appropriately,
the genre’s midnight hour – would continue after
1969, through to Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. But his place
within the larger matrix of American identity had begun to shift
as he staked out a more visible space on the imagined frontier.

Notes

1. Midnight Cowboy has elements of
gross homophobia. The comment “that [cowboy] stuff is for fags” is
one of several derogatory comments. The first time that Rizzo
meets Joe, he yells “get away faggot!” at an effeminate
man who wanders up to their table. As far as “real” homosexuals
are displayed in the movie, they usually exhibit severe self-loathing
and are coded as pathetic or sinister. In some ways, Midnight
Cowboy can be considered more homophobic than the westerns
it deconstructs, as if it is compensating for the Pandora’s
box of masculine crisis that it helped to open. Though it was
revolutionary for interrogating constructions of cowboy masculinity,
the film seems deeply ambivalent over the answers it finds.

2. During his visit to Harvard, one student asked
Wayne what he thought of the women’s liberation movement,
to which the star replied: “I think they have a right to
work anywhere they want to [long pause] as long as they have
dinner ready when we want it.” And during his infamous
1971 interview with Playboy, Wayne remarked: “I don’t
feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them
[Native Americans]. Our so-called stealing of this country from
them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers
of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly
trying to keep it for themselves.”

3. Warhol also uses a rape scene to connect his
cowboy story to the Vietnam war. One of the brothers in Lonesome
Cowboys comments that the rape of Ramona “was fun,” and
another retorts: “we’re not here for fun – we’re
here to… get ready for World War One.” Playing cowboy
like American GIs, the brothers’ attack is seemingly a
preparation for war. Yet the rape scene, during which Ramona
yells “you faggots,” is farcical, confirming – like Midnight Cowboy – the vulnerability of America’s
cowboy dreams and perhaps also the failure of its attempt at
imperialist rape. Both films echo the emasculation of Kovic,
crippled by a war wound, whose veteran memoir spoke of an invalid
nation.